About the Author

Ran Huntsberry is a poet of fierce compassion and unflinching honesty, whose life reads like a mosaic of unconventional paths and transformative roles. He has been, at various times, a corporate leadership coach guiding mavericks through personal and professional reinvention, a restorative justice facilitator healing communities, a rural family therapist and counselor to violent boys on the margins of hope, and a subversive college professor who challenged institutions with truth and tenderness.

Ran's creative spirit has taken many forms: he co-founded Sonomama Improvisation Dance Theater, trained as an Aikido instructor, and built both houses and poems with his hands-as an oil field roustabout, carpenter, and lifelong storyteller. He studied for three formative years in Japan, spent eleven at Harvard (where he never quite fit the mold), played football in Montana, and grew up an Oklahoma ruffian, then a southern Illinois runaway.

Born to a father who chased oil and dreams northward and a mother-adopted and Taoist-who embodied the spirit of Will Rogers ("never met a man she didn't like"), Ran writes from the collision of grit and grace, struggle and surrender. His poetry distills decades of lived experience into verses that are simultaneously tender and raw, reflecting on identity, family, impermanence, justice, and the wild mystery of being human.